Broken Ice--A Novel Page 8

“It’s the truth.”

  “It’s bullshit.”

  “No, man! I promise! I’ll show you. The note is in my shoe.”

  I looked over at Ellegaard. He shrugged.

  “Show me. And that guy with a gun on you? He’s a terrible shot. He might aim to wound, but that bullet could go anywhere. So the only thing that better come out of that shoe is a nasty-smelling piece of paper.”

  “Shut up. You think I’m stupid?” Ernesto removed his left boot and pulled out an envelope. He handed it to me.

  Inside was a piece of plain white paper that backed up Ernesto’s story in a sans serif font printed on an ink-jet printer. He could have made it himself to back up a lie, but ever since Ernesto’s hands came out of his pockets, he looked more like an innocent scared kid and less like a threat. “I’m going to have to keep this.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t need it anymore.”

  “So whoever gave you this, how are they going to know you delivered the message so you get your fifty bucks?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Unlock your phone for me.”

  “Dude, that’s against the law.”

  “I don’t think it is, but maybe we should call the police and ask them to come over and clarify what’s legal and what’s not. Just in case. What do you say?”

  “I say this sucks and so do you.” He grabbed his smartphone off the sidewalk, unlocked it, and handed it to me.

  I said, “Lucky you. Now my fingerprints are all over your phone so the police can prove I asked you to unlock it.”

  “Shut up. You’re not funny.”

  “Funnier than you, Ernesto.” I looked at his text messages. His mom said she had to work late. A kid asked about a missed assignment at school. Another kid asked him why he wasn’t in class. He followed Trevor Noah and Gabriel Iglesias on Twitter. His Facebook page showed pictures of him running cross-country for Southwest High School—in my old neighborhood—and standing under a mathlete banner with half a dozen other kids. I saw no pictures of him kneeling by a dead deer with a bow resting at his side. No pictures of him competing in an archery competition. No pictures of him smoking a cigarette or drinking a beer. Kid was a straight-up nerd. “You go to Southwest?”

  “What about it?”

  “Kind of far from home, isn’t it?”

  “So what? Lot of kids go to schools not by their house.”

  “Do you go there because of the IB program?”

  “Just give me my phone.”

  I punched in my number. My phone rang. I hung up and handed Ernesto his phone. “You have my number. Use it if you need it.”

  “Why would I need anything from you?”

  “I’m a private investigator looking for Linnea Engstrom. She’s only a year older than you. If you find out anything about Linnea and think she might be in danger or if you just want to do what’s right, give me a call. Plus, there’s a hell of a lot more than a hundred bucks in it for you.”

  Ernesto kept his eyes on his phone. “How much more?”

  “Five times as much. I know you can do the math. And even if you don’t find out anything about Linnea, it’s good to know a private investigator who might be willing to do you a favor.”

  Ernesto shot me a quick glance, softer and inquisitive. Then he got off his bucket and walked away. I returned to the Volvo. Anne was still lying across the backseat. “You can get up now.”

  Anne popped up. She spoke with a sense of urgency, the most I’d heard since I met her. “Does that boy know where Linnea is?”

  “My guess is no. Whoever put that note in his locker did so because they know he’s smart enough to not fuck up delivering a message.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  I dropped them at the Saint Paul Hotel, where Ellegaard’s car was still parked in the ramp. I told Ellegaard I’d meet him back at the office around noon and to call me if he heard anything more from Madison PD or Roger Engstrom. Then I drove east to Woodbury and the house on Crestmoor Bay. Heavy gray clouds threatened something wet.

  I parked on the street and approached the columned facade. The front door was ajar an inch. Maybe Ben was late for school and ran out in a hurry. But it wasn’t summer and the house was wired for security. Even in the isolated opulent suburb of Woodbury, an unattended open front door is unusual. I rang the bell and waited for Winnie Haas’s voice. It didn’t come. I rang the bell again and waited two full minutes. No answer.

  I pulled a leather glove out of my jacket pocket, put it on my right hand, and opened the door. “Hello! Anyone home?” Silence. I stepped into the foyer and shut the door behind me. I walked back to the kitchen. It was spotless. And no Winnie Haas. Same with the great room, where Ellegaard and I had sat with Winnie and Ben last night. The glass of the glassed-in fireplace was cold and dark. I walked back to the foyer and paused. Cool air tripped down the stairs. I looked at the thermostat. Sixty-two degrees. It sure as hell wasn’t sixty-two degrees upstairs.

  I climbed the oak staircase, listening between steps. For a running shower, a hairdryer, the sounds of sex, anything that would explain why Winnie Haas hadn’t responded to the doorbell or my voice. I tried one more time. “Hello?” I ascended another step. “Winnie?” Nothing.

  When I reached the top landing, the draft became a breeze. At the end of the hall, double doors stood open at unequal angles. I felt cold air on my face. Everything seemed wrong. I walked toward the double doors. The cold got colder.

  I slipped through the master suite’s double doors and saw Winnie Haas bent over on the bed, facedown, an arrow in her back. Red shaft. Yellow fletching. She wore jeans and a lavender sweater with a salad-plate-size circle of blood soaked through the cashmere, the arrow at its center like the circle had always been there, and the archer shot a dead-center bull’s-eye. I walked toward her with small, light steps, as if life might return to Winnie Haas’s dead body, and I didn’t want to scare it away. I pulled off my right glove with my teeth and felt the back of her neck. She had cooled but wasn’t cold. Close to room temperature, I guessed. I got on my phone to call the police but saw another text from Char Northagen and called her first.

  I told Char I’d found a lukewarm body in Ramsey County with an arrow in its back and gave her the address. Then I called the Woodbury Police, St. Paul PD, and Ellegaard. Dozens of people would be there in minutes. I wasn’t looking forward to the wait.

  The breeze breathed some life into Winnie Haas’s hair, and for the first time since entering the room, I noticed a pair of French doors open to a deck off the master bedroom. The right door jostled in the March wind. But the left door was wide open, pinned against the inside wall. The sun broke through the clouds, and I saw the blood. Tiny droplets splattered on the left French door. The pattern looked unusual. It took me a moment to realize that’s because the blood splattered from the bottom up. I walked around the foot of the bed toward the open doors.

  First I saw the yellow fletching, just below the height of the bed. Then, wedging the door against the wall, Roger Engstrom lay faceup, his dead eyes open wide, a red arrow in his chest. Blood had sprayed from his mouth.

  12

  I needed to know one thing about Winnie Haas before the police arrived. I found it in the master bathroom’s medicine cabinet. The label on the prescription pill bottle read oxycodone. The bottle was full, but the prescription had been issued eight months ago. I took a picture of the label then went downstairs, wondering why an old prescription would have that many pills in the bottle. Sirens interrupted my thoughts.

  They came in cars and vans and trucks with tires squealing and lights flashing. Vehicles from Woodbury PD and the Ramsey County sheriff and Ramsey County medical examiner competed for parking with reporters and news producers and camera crews. They poured out of squad cars and unmarked cars and trucks and news vans with satellite dishes sticking thirty feet into the air to beam it all live. They filled the curb around the cul-de-sac, shrinking the asphalt circle and aligned t
hemselves down Crestmoor Bay and around the corner out of sight.

  Woodbury Police took charge. A uniform with an iPad stood at the front door, the bouncer outside a club called Double Murder. They set up base camp in the attached, heated, triple garage. Police filled it with folding tables and chairs. Half an hour after I discovered Winnie Haas’s body, she was hosting a party with cardboard cartons of coffee and to-go cups on a concrete floor dusted with sand and road salt.

  St. Paul PD sent one officer as a liaison representing their search for Linnea Engstrom. Officer Terrence Flynn, the no-neck doughy uniform who Ellegaard and I encountered outside dead Haley Housh’s cave, poured himself a little coffee and a lot of half-and-half. It wasn’t St. Paul’s investigation, and Officer Flynn seemed to be luxuriating in his bystander status. We made eye contact. He offered no smile then slipped into the throng.

  The forensics people combed the house while Char Northagen scraped under twenty fingernails and employed two rectal thermometers. She and I had something to discuss, but it would have to wait until the latex gloves came off.

  A Detective Waller from Woodbury PD questioned me then had me walk her through my movements from the point I got out of my car to when I found the bodies. Detective Waller had large, round brown eyes. She stood five six in a slight body. Her face was triathlon gaunt—you could make out her skull under her skin. She wore a navy-blue pantsuit with a silk cream blouse buttoned all the way to the collar. She had yellow, shoulder-length hair cut for her convenience more than anyone’s pleasure. Jamie Waller’s appearance made no statement. Everything Detective Jamie Waller wanted you to know about her could be seen in her big brown eyes that weren’t all that big—they just appeared that way in a face with so little flesh.

  Detective Waller asked me to check out the basement with her, so we headed downstairs where we found Ben Haas’s quarters. They functioned like a separate apartment with a kitchen, living area, and a door that led to the back patio. Sculpted sage-green carpet. Painted tan walls trimmed out with white molding. Posters for Trampled by Turtles and Pete Seeger and The Avett Brothers. Framed architectural drawings hung on the wall next to a piece of broken-up Sheetrock taken from some other wall and signed with a gold Sharpie. The signature belonged to Minnesota-born, rock-and-roll legend Graham Itasca.

  A plastic architectural model of a modern home sat on the dresser, probably a gift from Raynard Haas, hoping his flawless aesthetic taste would rub off on his son despite living in Winnie’s cookie-cutter McMansion. The model showed every stud, beam, and joist. Meticulous work.

  Recessed lights pocked the ceiling that was a full eight feet high. The basement didn’t feel much like a basement at all. Light poured in through a wall of windows that looked out to the backyard and slough beyond.

  Papers and books buried a desk. The kind of furniture manufactured in North Carolina and sold in expensive mall-adjacent stores where parents buy small children big furniture to grow into. Guitars and mandolins stood on stands and lay stored away in cases. Ben had a queen-size bed in the sleeping area. We found it unmade and disheveled, as if a writhing snake had slept in it.

  “Let’s take a look at the mechanical room,” said Detective Waller.

  I followed her into a room with walls of poured concrete, a washer, dryer, tank-less hot water heater, a manifold board of red and blue PEX plumbing tubes, a similar board of coax cable connectors, and a laundry chute that fed dirty clothes into a bin made of spaced wooden slats. The bin was empty. I said, “What are you looking for in the mechanical room?”

  “I have no idea,” said Detective Jamie Waller. “I just want to hear what do you think happened before you got here, and this seems like a good place to talk.” I must have looked dubious. She continued, “Woodbury has a small police department. I’m the only experienced homicide investigator. I spent sixteen years as an MP in Iraq and Afghanistan investigating friendly-fire victims and suicides and outright troop-on-troop murder. I saw a lot of bodies and a lot of blood. The one thing I learned investigating all those deaths: it’s no good going it alone.”

  “I’m not available for hire the moment.”

  “That’s okay, because I can’t hire you. Woodbury hired me in case we catch something like Sandy Hook or San Bernadino. They’re not going to fork over extra for a private.”

  Detective Jamie Waller wanted a freebie. It didn’t happen every day with cops. They didn’t want to be in a private detective’s debt. But once in a great while a cop couldn’t avoid it, and you can’t have enough police officers owing you favors.

  “I’m not looking for a specific chain of events,” she said. “I just want to pick your brain.”

  I looked around the room to buy a little time, then said, “All right. I think Winnie Haas knew something about Linnea Engstrom’s whereabouts, most likely through her son, Ben, who was sleeping with Haley Housh.”

  “The girl who was found in the cave?”

  “Yes. She’s also from Warroad. And I believe Ben Haas has more of a connection to Linnea than he’s admitted. I hope now he’ll be more willing to talk. That is, assuming he had nothing to do with this mess. I received a text from Winnie late last night saying she wanted to talk to me without Ben present.

  “Maybe whatever she had to tell me she wanted to share with Roger, as well. So she asked him to come over. He told his wife he was going to a business meeting. Why he didn’t tell her the truth is something worth looking into. But it may be as simple as he didn’t want to get her hopes up. Or the reason may be more complicated.

  “Someone out there doesn’t want Linnea found, maybe someone who shoots arrows. It could be Linnea herself. Or a friend of hers. Or a lover. Then again, maybe someone snatched her off the street, didn’t expect this much heat, and is protecting himself. Whoever it is, he or she moves about town unencumbered by bow and arrows and, as far as we know, undetected. I don’t know how that happens but it did in downtown St. Paul yesterday and again today here in Woodbury.”

  Waller bit the inside of her cheek and leaned against the utility sink. “So you got nothing.”

  “Less than nothing. But as soon as your crime scene unit is done upstairs, I’d get ’em down here to look for signs of Linnea. A hair in Ben’s bed or in the lint trap of the dryer. I wouldn’t be surprised if they found her fingerprint on the door that leads directly outside.”

  Waller looked dubious.

  “Arrows don’t leave shell casings, so I’d check the slough out back for trampled reeds or anything that might have fallen out of a pocket or quiver. The slough has a clean view of the master bedroom. It’s possible the archer never entered the house but shot through the open French doors. The victims stumbled around a bit after they got shot then fell where I found them. And check the backyard under the edge of the master bedroom’s deck for any sign of someone jumping out or using a rope to climb up. Then again, the archer may have been in the house.”

  Waller sighed. “You’re boring me. Besides, you told me the front door was open when you arrived.”

  “You asked for my gut. Did you expect a name and address?”

  “I expected something that warrants your reputation.”

  “I’m looking for Linnea Engstrom, not who killed her father and Winnie Haas.”

  “You’re so full of shit, Shapiro. Linnea disappears then her father’s found murdered, and you don’t think the two cases are connected?” She had me there. “If we work together, you won’t just be helping me, I’ll be helping you. And no one’s so good they don’t need help.”

  “It’s not that I don’t need help. It’s just sometimes less of a pain in the ass to go it alone.”

  “Are you looking for who shot you?”

  “That’s not my first priority.”

  “Seems odd.”

  “Now you’re getting to know me.”

  “I am. And I’m not impressed.”

  “Listen. I’m not one of those crime scene savants who can look at the position of a body and the dust on
a banister and intuit the butler did it so he could steal the family jewels and run off to Iowa with the maid. I investigate one step at a time. It involves talking to a lot of people, not my favorite, hours of sitting around, sticking my neck out, putting miles on the car, and running into dead ends. Once in a while it pays off. Most of the time it doesn’t. I don’t know if you’re trying to get this double murder wrapped up before your spring vacation, but my helping you probably won’t speed things along. So if we work together, you’ll need to adjust your expectations. That is, coincidentally, the key to happiness. You may want to try it.”

  Waller stared at me, her jaw clenched. I could see the muscles strapped under her face and the horseshoe of teeth in her upper jaw. “I am a patient person, Mr. Shapiro. And I don’t go on spring vacation. Like Saturday nights and New Year’s Eve, it’s for amateurs.” She smiled at me, using only her brown eyes. Sixteen years in the army had taught Jamie Waller the value of making an alliance. She wanted a body next to her on the front line, not a friend.

  I said, “All right, Detective. I’ll update you daily.”

  “Twice daily, at least. And it’ll flow both ways.”

  We shook hands as if it meant something then returned upstairs. Ellegaard stood in the kitchen. Anne Engstrom sat in a wooden chair. Her face had neither color nor expression. Her eyes looked dull behind their plate glass windows. Ellegaard said something to her about his needing to talk to me and we’d just be on the other side of the room if she needed us. He touched her shoulder, which she didn’t seem to notice, then we stepped away.

  “Anne just ID’d Roger’s body,” he said. “She has a sister in Wayzata. The sister is on her way to take Anne home. Where were you?”

  “In the basement with Detective Waller from Woodbury PD. Ran me through it because I discovered the bodies.”

  “You want to fill me in on that?”

  “In a minute. Any sign of Ben?”

  “He’s in an upstairs bedroom with a couple counselors from the high school. He has alibis for the whole morning. Poor kid had to make the ID. He’s a mess. The dad’s in Chicago visiting a job site. Woodbury Police got ahold of him. He’s on his way to O’Hare now.”